I spent quite a lot of time weighing up the pros and cons of the two most-similar disk arrays on the market, HP Lefthand and Dell EqualLogic. With similar names (PS4000E – Dell; P4000 – HP) and similar initially observable features (that is, they’re both lots of disks in a box, they’re both iSCSI) it was quite difficult to work out whether one was better than the other or not.
I chose Dell EqualLogic in the end, which means the rest of this post is likely to be flavoured with a bit of Dell bias, but I’ll try and explain why I went that way (depsite at the time receiving quite poor sales support due to placing the order in the middle of some bizzare change from partner channels to Dell Direct).
I keep forgetting the commands to shutdown the EqualLogic arrays that I’ve got and the R710s that are serving them. I’m still in a test and dev environment so doing safe powerdowns happens quite often (as does deliberately non-safe ones), either way, these are the shutdown commands (I’m assuming you’ve set up management IP addresses on both that allow you to SSH in:
iDRAC6 (Dell R710s)
racadm serveraction powerdown
EqualLogic (remember to connect to each member and perform a shutdown)
shutdown
Yep, they really are that simple. I hope to be able to combine these into a script which can be triggered by environmental monitoring etc.